Course Building, Social Media and Made for Everything Hearing Aids

Hello again! We spent most of last week dealing with a couple of technological challenges that we’ll review momentarily, but it’s looking like we’ll have much more to blog about in the near future.

The big and good news is that we officially got rolling with Mirasee’s Course Builder’s Laboratory, with an assigned one-on-one coach and an amazingly comprehensive collection of resources to help us along. What’s really great is that the website is virtually 100% accessible. Every lesson (and there are a lot of them) includes an excellent video with transcripts in both Word and PDF formats. There are also reflective exercises and multiple choice quizzes that are definitely helping us modify our thought processes and to understand just what is involved in things like market research. This is leading us to course development that truly meets identified customer needs.

Aside from totally changing the way we were thinking about how all of this might work, Mirasee’s program is causing us to experience a really productive combination of excitement and confidence. We are now scientists in a laboratory, and, if we try something that doesn’t quite work, well, it’s a learning experience, not a failure. And by doing the work, it all feels very positive and we happily spend several hours a day doing our homework.

As far as social media is concerned, we’re happy to announce the official launch of the iHabilitation Canada YouTube page, where we’ll be discussing our progress and providing ongoing glimpses into the kind of material that you can expect to find in our first pilot course. It sure feels good to be putting our new audiovisual equipment to use in the production of real live content!

Also, I can’t end the social media comments for this issue without thanking my new pal, Rick Cooper, of Social Media Outcomes for his great coaching session about online publicity work. Not only was he full of great advice, but our 30-minute call turned out to be a minute or two short of a full hour. Furthermore, he’s very supportive of the work we’re doing and we look forward to future collaboration.

But getting back to the “laboratory experience”, one of the things we’re learning is how to be better at handling diversions and roadblocks that keep us from just getting on with it. Our roadblock for this issue (not that we’ll feature one every time!) has to do with an unfortunate experience with Made For iPhone (MFi) hearing aids.

A friend and I, working with two different MFi brands, have discovered that the folks who make these things appear to have not given much consideration to hard-of-hearing blind people who may want to use their products in conjunction with a Bluetooth braille display and QWERTY keyboard. Well, after a week of static in both ears, freezing braille displays and repeated keystrokes that were never physically executed, I said enough, thank you! So now I have Made For Everything (MFE) hearing aids that work like a charm. And no, I don’t care about having to wear a Com-pilot box around my neck. Furthermore, this particular product will work with Android and Windows. What more could one want?

I mention this technological diversion so that others might be aware, should they find themselves in a similar situation, but there’s another reason. Even at this early stage of our official entrepreneurial training, I found that I was already much less stressed out by the situation than would have been the case last year. The usual “OMG, now what!” was over-ridden by “Well, let’s see. This isn’t the only choice. Guess I’d better ask around.” And sure enough, thanks to Jonathan Mosen, I learned about the wonderful MFE hearing aids that are in my ears as I write this. They’re definitely keepers!

So, that’s it for this time. We hope you will check out our YouTube channel and subscribe for more updates. We’ll have a couple of other exciting announcements very soon. Incidentally, we know there are some serious problems with our website – another slight roadblock. It’s not easy to keep good and consistent tech help, but we already think we know who will fix it. But watch for iHabilitation on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We’ll be there!